One of my favorite memories of childhood is lying on the floor of my
Dad’s office at Northbrae Community Church – he was the minister, about
which I have a great story that has been cut for time – in Berkeley,
California, reading Peanuts strips, of which my Dad had several
collections shelved alongside Bibles, commentaries, philosophy and
whatnot. I want to say those comic strip collections had pride of place
on that bookshelf, but the truth is I was lying on the floor and that’s
the only reason I spotted them there on the lowest shelf. So who knows?

Somehow I got to reading some about Charles Schulz and his approach to
his work. Maybe there was an interview in the back of one of the books.
Early on, I took in his opinion that the reason we all love Charlie
Brown so much is that “he keeps on trying.” To kick the football, to
talk to the little red-haired girl, to win a baseball game, to belong.

I didn’t connect with that sentiment. It’s not clear what I did do with
it, but I never felt like that was a reason to love Charlie Brown. At
the time I just loved him instinctually. Here was this kid who, like me,
didn’t really fit in, and got a lot of shit thrown at him for no reason
that he could see – maybe just because others needed some entertainment.
Just like him, I didn’t have the tools to deal with that harassment, not
without poisoning myself a little bit inside every time, and just to mix
metaphors and switch over to the Peanuts animated cartoons, none of
the adults seemed to be speaking my language when I asked them what to
do. Their advice – just ignore them when they pick on you! – might as
well have been a series of muted trumpet sounds.

I didn’t love Charlie Brown because he kept on trying – I loved him
because the alternative was loving a world that thinks some people are
just better than others, and that those people who don’t seem to have
the world’s favor should certainly never ask why or why not. They should
just keep on trying. (Charles Schulz, by the way, was a lifelong
Republican donor.)

Now, I’m notorious for reading literature a bit shallowly (and yes,
Peanuts is literature, up there with The Great Gatsby as some of the
greatest and most iconically American of the 20th century, but that’s
another post), and I miss layers of meaning sometimes. My dad pointed
out as I was writing this that reading Charlie Brown more generally as
hope, and specifically as a tragic hero defined by his inability to give
up hope, is a pretty strong reading that also supports that Schulz
quote. Personally, I could see Schulz connecting with Charlie Brown more
on the level of commitment to one’s job; the fact that Schulz could do
the same gags with Charlie Brown for 50+ years and never have to deal
with him changing is something he could feel good about (n.b. his own
career as a cartoonist, and the occasional strips about Brown’s father,
a barber, and his connection to that craft). Charlie Brown kept showing
up for work, which Schulz and others could admire and enjoy on more than
one level.

But permit me an indulgence. Lately I’ve been nursing this crackpot
theory that the American Civil War actually started in England in the
1600’s. I have another theory on the side, more straightforwardly
supportable, that said war is also ongoing. To get at my case for its
beginning, though, I’ve gone to Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in
America by historian David Hackett Fischer. One of the so-called
folkways – a “normative structure of values, customs and meanings” –
Fischer chronicles is that of the Royalist side of the English Civil War
that became known as the Cavaliers.

The Cavaliers were, as you might guess, known for having horses when
their opponents more often didn’t, but also for mostly being wealthy and
interested in letting you know they were wealthy, and for their interest
in having big estates with really, really big fuck-off lawns; a
particular style of being landed as well as moneyed. The English Civil
War separated the monarchy from political power – if not quite for good,
and as it turns out, Puritans make lousy rulers – but it didn’t
separate the Cavaliers from the kind of power that they had. And when
England got cold for them in the 1640’s, a lot of them moved to more
receptive territory in the colonies, namely in Virginia and points
south. Fischer draws a strong correlation between this migration and the
“Southern Strategy” that put conservatism back into its current power in
America.

In the English Civil War, the King and the Cavaliers were opposed by a
bunch of factions which, thanks in part to the close-cropped Puritan
hairstyle, became collectively known as Roundheads. I was so happy when
I heard that. I imagined that round-headed kid, good ol’ Charlie Brown,
in peasant clothes holding up a pike, demanding an end to the divine
right of kings. Permit me that.

I allow that Charlie Brown is an awkward symbol for forces aligned
against conservatism. He doesn’t win much, for starters. There’s also
the uncomfortable invitation to misogyny in the relationship between
failed jock Charlie Brown and frequent football holder Lucy Van Pelt,
which a certain flavor of person will accept wholeheartedly. Speaking of
which, one facet of Charlie’s woes is a major contributor to the entitlement we now see in certain nerd cultures gone sour. (There was a
point when it could easily have done that in me. I’m still not entirely
sure how I avoided this.)

Instead, I ask you to respond to Charlie-Brown-the-symbol the way I did
as a child, but couldn’t articulate until recently: negatively. I want
you to tell him to stop being who he is, to grow out of his
perhaps-essential nature and start making demands. But stay his friend,
by demanding that the forces that make his world step into the frame and
be seen, lose the muted trumpets this time, and name their reasons for
letting this world exist. Charlie Brown has hope,
but he shouldn’t need it.

This is obviously personal for me. I didn’t become tough and wise by
virtue of recreational abuse at the hands of my peers; any wisdom I have
I was able to get in spite of their best efforts. Any strength is left
over from what they sapped. Some kids might respond to abuse and
interpersonal adversity by getting stronger, but if you’re writing off
the ones who don’t as losers, or trying the same methods over and over
of teaching them to cope, you’re indulging yourself in a toxic,
convenient fantasy. Making others feel small to feel bigger yourself is
no more inevitable a part of human life than humans killing one another
for sport. Polite society eliminated one of those; it can lose its taste
for the other.

When people become identified with a power they take for granted, they
go halfway into bloodlust when you threaten to mitigate that power in
even the smallest way. In the end, that’s the basis of conservatism. But
the power to take a shit on someone, at some point, when we’ve decided
it’s okay, might be one that we all identify with. So I don’t have a lot
of hope that we’ll change this in my lifetime, or even make a dent. But
I want to stop kicking the football. I want to start asking the
question.